Re: Salinger and Buddhism as promised
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Mon, 22 Jun 1998 14:12:08 -0400
Me:
> > Succinctness and simplicity are stylistic/structural qualities.
Camille:
> Not necessarily. That's like saying a scream is a style. A scream is
> something which is by nature loud, impassioned, and (usually) fairly short.
> Likewise, a koan is a thought or observational `question' (which is really
> what a thought is) and a thought is always a fairly fleeting thing and thus
> is recorded as such.
Strictly speaking (from an epistemological standpoint), all things that
can be recognized, which is to say isolated from or within an
undifferentiated mass of empirical noise, must have characteristics. In
other words, it is the presence of differentiating characteristics that
make one identifiable event or action different from another, or
different from the absence of another--or different, at least, from a
blank, nonsignifying background against which they happen. In this line
of reasoning, both a scream and a koan have characteristics that can be
approached as stylistic or structural qualities. You mention that a
scream is *usually* short. This suggests a set of stylistic or
structural qualities (characteristics) that can be used to classify a
scream, distinguishing it from another noise. For instance, all screams
happen somewhere on a continuum from short to long, depending on their
"style," but most are short. And so I can look at shortness as a
stylistic property of most utterances that are called screams.
The big assumption I'm making here is that both koans and screams are
semiological events--utterances. Every instance of language--talking,
writing, singing, gurgling, guffawing, screaming, squealing, *not*
squealing, etc.--is first and foremost a semiological event with the
potential to signify something to someone, even if the "author" of the
event doesn't intend any signifying to happen. So while I agree with
you on a kind of intuitive level, I'm appealing to the fact that even
intuitive moments are subject to the laws of language, because they
happen inside of our human understanding, which is itself purely a
matter of language.
> Yes, of course. And this is the very nature of koans; the inducement of of
> a kind of realisation of meaning - not exactly satori, but at the very
> least the extraction of meaning from the mystery.
> It doesn't matter what
> kind of mystery; no more than does the nature of the crime in a detective
> novel.
I think it does matter what kind of mystery. Understanding a Salinger
story (as a mystery) requires a familiarity with western ways of
thinking, while understanding a koan requires precisely the opposite--a
bracketing off of western ways of thinking.
> It is the experience; this `koan like experience' which is the
> important thing, and Salinger is skillfull enough to render it in a
> koan-like way. Perhaps this wasn't the best example to pick - in fact it
> might be better to consider `A Perfect Day for Bananafish'
Or Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" or Jackson's "The Lottery" or just
about any other short story that might appear in an urbane American
periodical. Maybe I'm missing your point here...
> > In what sense do Salinger's writings differ from other writings in their
> > quest to be deciphered? What's the gem in there (and where is it?) that
> > distinguishes Salinger from, say, Sherwood Anderson?
>
> I can't comment on Anderson because I don't know his work, but the cult of
> deciphering seems integral to Salinger's work. Why else are we still
> wondering why Seymour killed himself, whether Franny is pregnant, exactly
> what Holden Caulfield's journey meant a good thirty years after these
> questions were first proposed to us?
These questions have straightforward answers, for me. I grant that
every reader's experience is different, but these questions don't seem
too extraordinary, nor do they seem the kind of questions one could ask
only of Salinger stories. What do the journeys of characters in Cormac
McCarthy novels mean? Faulkner novels? Is Stephen an "artist"? Is
Hamlet mad?
That's not the sort of conundrums we'd
> be discussing on say, a Jane Austen listserve (Joyce evokes a similar
> struggle but a linguistic rather than thematic one).
Of course, it's impossible to discuss anything on a list with Jorn
Barger.
For one, Salinger's
> stories tend to deviate from the traditional form of story writing -
> basically, pose a question and answer it by the end; move from A to B in a
> quiet and orderly fashion. More often they *end* with another kind of
> question or dilemma - both TCIR and Bananafish are good examples of that.
> That in itself seems somewhat Zen-like (as does the fact that Salinger is
> so indecipherable himself!). A lot of people I know told me after they read
> `Catcher' : `That was rubbish, it didn't go anywhere, it didn't have a
> beginning or end, it was all middle!'
One of my students last quarter said the same thing of _King Lear_. But
I agree with you, for the most part. It's just that most contemporary
fiction (in my experience) fits this bill. The traditional form of
storytelling began to break down as early as, say Wyatt, in the late
16th-century, and simple, linear narrative....actualy, I don't think
we're talking about linear vs. nonlinear or unlinear narratives. You
seem to be pointing to ambiguous endings, more than anything else.
Don't ambiguous endings abound in contemporary fiction? Endings that
raise more questions than they answer?
> > What I meant is that the shortness of a short story really has little in
> > common with the shortness of a koan.
>
> To a certain extent (although, as I said, both forms are concerned pretty
> much with putting as much meaning in as little space as possible, which is
> why a writer will choose to put across their theme in a short story rather
> than a novel) but we must remember that Salinger is a Western person
> essentially working in a Western milieu.
Yes, to a certain extent. To the extent that both koans and short
stories are *literary* texts, they have in common the same things that
all literary texts have in common. But within the subset of utterances
that we typically call "literary" (which, I admit, could as well be
*all* utterances), koans and short stories don't share much. Whales and
elephants are both mammals, and they are both large. Beyond, this,
even, they might both be observed in or near water with greater
frequency than other mammals. But their largeness is relative
(elephants being smaller, as koans are shorter than short stories), and
their association with water is quite different.
And isn't there something qualitatively different about themes that
become short stories instead of novels as well as something
quantitatively different? A writer doesn't necessarily take a theme and
then choose the appropriate vehicle. As you have pointed out, _Catcher_
is essentially a collection of episodes that could work as short stories
(at least two of the chapters began as short stories, though from a
different viewpoint). To push this point from either side, we would
have to clear up the matter of where short stories end and where novels
begin. No small task.
I agree entirely with your last thought above. Salinger is a western
person essentially working in a western milieu--the point of contention,
I suppose, is whether Salinger is a wester person, or whether he is an
*essentially* western person...
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu